Health body warns many UK areas have high Lyme disease risk

The UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) has named areas in southern England and the Scottish Highlands as being high risk regions for Lyme disease. However, the body also warned that infection can occur in many other places.

Around 2,000 to 3,000 new cases of Lyme disease are thought to occur in England and Wales every year. But in a draft guideline, Nice said that prevalence data is incomplete, and the body has called for a large study into Lyme disease in the UK.

Lyme disease is a bacterial infection spread by ticks, and can lead to conditions like meningitis, facial paralysis or heart failure if left untreated. UK areas known to have a particularly high population of ticks include Exmoor, the New Forest, the South Downs, the Lake District, the North York Moors, and the Scottish Highlands. Ticks are also relatively common in parts of Wiltshire, Berkshire, Surrey, West Sussex and Norfolk.

Not everyone who gets bitten by a tick will be infected with Lyme disease, as only a small proportion carry the bacteria that cause the condition. However, Nice has suggested that cases of Lyme disease are underestimated in the UK because family doctors and hospital clinicians are not required to report the number of cases they see.

That's a nice map, @justy. Apparently the Big Tick Project complied that map by asking vets throughout the UK to count the number of ticks they found on dogs each week, and to send the ticks to the University of Bristol for identification.

If you zoom into the map, it will tell you which species of tick were found on dogs in your area, using a colour coding scheme:

By the way, for those with Lyme, did you see the following thread about a Lyme patient who was cured after 18 months of daily mild hyperbaric oxygen therapy (mild HBOT), using a home soft hyperbaric chamber:

Because Borrelia are more-or-less anaerobic bacteria, the increased blood and tissue levels of oxygen arising from HBOT may kill Borrelia, and that may explain the success this patient had with HBOT.

I speculated in this thread that breathing pure 100% oxygen supplied by a £300 oxygen concentrator machine, and via a decent non-rebreather mask, might be almost as effective as using mild HBOT (which is far more expensive, costing around £5000 for a soft chamber).